


418. hunted

by piggy09



Series: The Sestre Daily Drabble Project [10]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels, Gen, Guardian Angels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-09
Updated: 2016-07-09
Packaged: 2018-07-22 15:05:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7443745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes they take girls nobody will miss, and they bring them to the angel factory.</p>
<p>Sometimes the girls get away.</p>
<p>But that's not very often at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	418. hunted

**Author's Note:**

> This is inspired by a comment badwolfgrapesoda left on the first drabble in this series: "I don't know if any of these drabbles will have an arc or plot or anything, or if any of this will ever be referenced again, but I'm secretly hoping that the unknown treetop angels are like... super sekrit government experiments that live in the woods. BECAUSE SCIENCE."
> 
> So sure! Super sekrit government angel experiments in the woods!
> 
> [warnings: vomit, blood, body horror]

“The angels are coming,” says the girl Sarah pulled out of the cage in the laboratory basement.

Sarah wants to slap her.

She _knows_ , alright, that the angels are coming. She knows because this girl has not shut up about it since Sarah broke the lock of her cage with a cinderblock and took her hands – starting to bud with itchy little feathers – and pulled her into the sun. Stupid of her to take the girl in the next cage over. She should have run on her own. She wouldn’t have had to deal with this – the blonde’s eyes rolling back into her head, babbling about the angels.

Sarah knows they’re coming. She can hear the rustling of their wings.

They won’t be happy. That two girls made it out. Angels forget who they were before, mostly, but they’ll remember that it could have been _them_ that had made it out of the cages. And instead-they-are-this. Shrieking masses of light and wings, holy, unholy.

The other girl stumbles over a tree root – because there are too many of those, here in this _stupid_ bloody impenetrable forest some horrible asshole built his angel laboratory in. They haven’t hit any of them too badly yet, but this stumble: painful. The kind that breaks bones.

Only the girl doesn’t fall. She looks as if she’s going to, and then the world kindly warps around her and she is back upright again. She blinks at Sarah. Feathers bud, gentle as bits of snow, between her eyelashes.

She slurs something that isn’t English, isn’t human. Sarah grabs her hand and pulls her forward. Running running running. The girl’s feathers itch at Sarah’s hand. Or maybe they’re her feathers. But she’d just gotten there, they’d only started the tests yesterday, surely it’s too early—

She can hear the angels screaming. The girl twitches, moans. Her back – ripples. Something on her back – ripples. _No_ , Sarah thinks, and other stupid things like: _not yet_ , and: _please_.

All around them the world is cracking. The angels are coming. The sound of bells, the smell of ozone, the angels are coming. But they sound so far away; the air is filled with the noise a fork makes when it hits the very edge of your glass. It’s a sort of high ringing.

The girl looks at Sarah. She opens her mouth, her horrible wonderful human mouth. “What’s your name,” she says, voice slurred with angel-liquor.

“Sarah,” says Sarah.

“Helena,” says the girl who is Helena. She shivers. The world around them: shivers. Sarah realizes Helena is holding everything still for them, just for a moment, even though it’s ripping feathers from her skin in twice the time.

“Don’t forget it?” Helena says. “Remember me? I was a person, once. I liked—” she shakes, makes an anguished sound – beautiful, like a choir. “Music, I liked music. I liked sunlight. Remember?”

Sarah reaches out and pulls Helena close. Her arms wrap around Helena and also they don’t reach around her at all and she can hear the angels, she can hear the angels singing. “I won’t forget you,” she whispers into Helena’s hair.

“I won’t forget you either,” Helena says. “You let me out. I will _remember_.” She speaks and she sings, the song underneath her words. The world shudders back into motion. Helena fills Sarah’s vision, bright like the sun. Sarah lets her go.

The angels arrive, all around them, a flock of terrible light. Helena smiles at her, a crooked sort of thing. Then she’s gone.

Sarah thought the sound of angels singing was the worst sound in the world.

She was wrong. Their screaming is worse. It’s so much worse.

The sky cracks into shards around her and Sarah stumbles back, presses her back to a tree and slides down to the ground because you can’t – stand like this, you can’t just stand there and watch as the angels go to war. She tries so hard to keep her eyes open. She can tell which one is Helena – it feels like a girl you would hold in your arms, it sings like sunlight. At the very edges of it she can almost hear her name. It’s ripping the other angels apart. The world is burning, and also it isn’t at all. The angel that was Helena is killing every single other angel, because Sarah reached her hand into Helena’s cage and said _get up, go now, we have to run. We have to run._

Angels bleed bright red human blood, turns out. When a splatter hits the ground between Sarah’s feet, bright red and steaming and vivid-real – she turns her head to the side and vomits. All around her the sky is bleeding. She doesn’t know how much of the blood belongs to what used to be Helena. She should run. But she can’t run. The whole world hurts, so beautiful and screaming that it makes her want to tear herself apart.

And then there is: silence. Sarah looks up from the ground. She’s being watched by one single non-Euclidian shape, all feathers and strange angles. Angel angles.

“Helena,” Sarah says quietly, and the light bleeds. In the middle of it, the arcs of the feathers look something like a smile. Maybe. If she stares hard enough she can feel the wind whipping through the car window, an itch in her throat telling her to sing along. It feels like being happy. It feels like remembering.

She leans back against the tree and breathes to keep from sobbing. The angel hovers forward and touches her, so lightly, like it knows that it wasn’t meant to. Then it sputters – once – twice – and it’s gone.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed!


End file.
